Teachers of the Inner Chambers Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China [Hardcover]

Rejecting both popular image and accepted Western and Chinese scholarship on the status of women in premodern China, this pathbreaking work argues that literate gentrywomen in seventeenth-century Jiangnan were far from being oppressed or silenced. The author reconstructs the social, emotional, and intellectual worlds of these women from the interstices between ideology, practice, and self-perception. Ko challenges simplistic depictions of women as victims and argues that within their social and cultural constraints, a women's literary culture developed that transcended public and private spheres and redefined womanhood. . . . This multifaceted book is a breakthrough in the study of women as part of Chinese cultural and social history.